places, more befitting the worst of beggars than poorest of servants." There is a doubt, however, as to whether Lovelace died in such abject poverty, poor, dependent, and unhappy as he might have been. Lovelace's verse is often strained, affected, and wanting in judgment; but at times he mounts a bright-winged Pegasus, and with plume and feather flying, tosses his hand up, gay and chivalrous as Rupert's bravest. His verses to Lucy Sacheverell, on leaving her for the French camp, are worthy of Montrose himself. The last two lines-- "I could not love thee, dear, so much, Lov'd I not honour more"-- contain the thirty-nine articles of a soldier's faith. And what Wildrake could have sung in the Gate House or the Compter more gaily of liberty than Lovelace, when he wrote,-- "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage. If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty"? [Illustration: LOVELACE IN PRISON (_see page 128_).] Whenever we read the verse that begins,-- "When love, with unconfined wings, Hovers within my gates, And my divine Althea brings, To whisper at my grates," the scene rises before us--we see a fair pale face, with its aureole of golden hair gleaming between the rusty bars of the prison door, and the worn visage of the wounded Cavalier turning towards it as the flower turns to the sun. And surely Master Wildrake himself, with his glass of sack half-way to his mouth, never put it down to sing a finer Royalist stave than Lovelace's "To Althea, from Prison,"-- "When, linnet-like, confined, I With shriller note shall sing The mercy, sweetness, majesty, And glories of my king; When I shall voice aloud how good He is, how great should be, Th' enlarged winds that curl the flood Know no such liberty."